I worked in Brussels in the late 90s, commuting from London on the first Eurostar on a Monday morning, working long hours on a millennium bug project at a factory site, and coming home Friday for weekends in London. I didn’t spend any time exploring the city and other places in Belgium back then, and returning over 25 years later was a strange encounter indeed. Much has changed, and even more has not!
I visited in early July 2026 for a long weekend with my husband split between Brussels and Bruges, taking the Eurostar from London St Pancras to Brussels-Midi, which takes under two hours, faster than many domestic journeys and with no airport hassles.
We stayed at The Dominican, a hotel built on the site of a fifteenth-century Dominican monastery near La Monnaie opera house. The lifts play Gregorian plain chant as you ride between floors, which set the tone for a weekend of relics and sacred places. The painter Jacques-Louis David lived and died in exile in a house on this site, another layer of history under the breakfast room.
If you can’t visit in person, walk with me through the city in the photos below.
Cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula
The cathedral celebrates its 800th anniversary in 2026, counting from the Gothic rebuilding begun around 1226. The twin west towers went up between 1470 and 1485, and the whole church was only completed in 1519.
Its patron Gudula died in 712, and legend says the devil kept blowing out her lantern on the way to morning prayers until an angel relit it. The cathedral describes her lantern as “the small flame of Christian faith, shining in a troubled time.”
[Read more…] about Brussels, Belgium: Gothic Churches, Bruegel, and Memento Mori